mPassport Paris Keeps You Alive in the City of Lights

mPassport Paris by HTH Worldwide is one of the more useful apps in the App Store. If you’re on your way to Paris and are concerned about your health, this app will tell you where to find doctors, what medicine is equivalent in France to what you’re taking, and how to translate symptoms you’re having into French. Currently, the mPassport app is only available for Paris, but they also have a subscription-based web interface for the entire world. Presumably, Paris is the first stop in making medical apps for a number of international cities.

When you open the app, you can see right off the bat how useful it’s going to be for your medical needs. Say you have an unusual cough and would like to see a doctor about it. The very first button you see is “Request Appointment,” which takes you to a list of doctor specialties, and then the doctor offices themselves, and then the info such as phone number (which you can tap to call) and address (for which there is a map). It’s really just as easy as that!

Also, if you run out of some medicine there is a drug equivalency guide. With this guide you can scroll to whatever medicine it is you’re missing and find out the French name for it. You can also scroll to French names and find out their English counterpart. I don’t think I really have to tell you how useful this is for someone who doesn’t speak French!

There are also Emergency Service numbers, Hospital locations and Pharmacy locations. This app wins for being that comprehensive in its goal to provide medical information to the Parisian traveler. But there’s even more. Down at the bottom of the home page there is a button labeled Medical Translations, and, for me, this is where the app really shines. There are two choices: either medical phrases or medical terms. If you’re looking for a single word to translate, you want terms, but if you go into phrases you can find a wealth of common phrases relating to medical wellbeing and care along with their written French translation and if you tap on the translation you can hear an attractive female voice speaking the phrase. So, if you have a medical problem, you don’t even have to speak French – just get out you iPhone with mPassport Paris. Although, it does take a minute to find “I need a doctor quickly.”

A Location tab shows you a GPS-enabled map with pins for nearby doctors and pharmacies, a Recents tab shows you what you’ve been looking at recently within the app, and a Saved tab shows you those things which you’ve marked as your favorite. This app gets high marks for usefulness and human welfare, but one drawback keeps it from a full 10 – it’s only useful if you’re going to Paris (and to a lesser extent, France).

mPassport Paris requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later and is compatible with both iPhone and iPod Touch.